Page:Early Christianity outside the Roman empire.djvu/30

Rh John the son of Zebedee sent us from Ephesus,—from these writings shall ye read in the Churches of the Messiah and besides them nothing else shall ye read." This is the Canon of the Doctrine of Adai ,and the list is confirmed by the actual practice of Aphraates. I am not going to enter on the difficult and disputed question of the relative priority of the translation into Syriac of the Four Gospels and of the Diatessaron, important as it is in many ways. The investigation would involve us in a mass of detail quite foreign to the scale of this Lecture. Speaking generally, we may say that the scanty notices in Syriac writings and the usage of Aphraates himself are most naturally interpreted if we assume the Diatessaron to have been first in the field. Before the discovery of the Sinai Palimpsest of the Four Gospels in the Old Syriac version there was no doubt that the arguments for the priority of the Diatessaron seemed much the stronger. But now the balance of internal evidence has very considerably shifted: the more intimately we know